Jim Miller on Politics

Pseudo-Random Thoughts

What had been greeted as peace quickly changed into an era of 'Cold War'. And so it
has continued for the last thirty years. Stalin's successors have tried hard to appear
less cold-blooded than he, but under pressure — as when the Hungarians tried to
leave the Soviet camp in 1956, or twelve years later, when the Czechs sought to liberalize
their regime — they have acted every bit as ruthlessly. The ideological gulf
remains unbridged: there has been détente but no
rapprochement.

Whether this situation is comfortable or not, it is certainly stable. (p. 88)

That Atlas was published in 1982; seven years later, the
Berlin Wall
opened, and the Soviet bloc collapsed.

I can't say that I foresaw that collapse, at least not that soon. As nearly as I can
recall my thinking then, I expected that the Soviet bloc would collapse — of its own
contradictions — if we could hold on for one more generation. (And I wasn't
absolutely sure that we could.)

McEvedy was a very smart man,
smart enough to be respected by historians, even though he had been trained as a
psychiatrist. But he still missed badly on that prediction (as most did).

(There is a
newer version
of the Atlas. I haven't looked at it, but now I think I'll have to, just to see
what explanation he gives for that mistaken prediction.)

President Obama has a long track record of insulting the Poles. In 2010 he chose to play
golf on the day of the funeral of the Polish President Lech Kaczynski, the Polish First Lady, and
94 senior officials who perished in the Smolensk air disaster. Eight months earlier
he humiliated Warsaw by pulling out of the agreement over Third Site missile defence
installations in Poland and the Czech Republic. And last night Barack Obama caused
huge offence in Poland by referring to a Nazi death camp in Poland as “a Polish death camp”
while awarding the Presidential Medal of Freedom to a Polish resistance fighter.

It's almost as if Obama doesn't like staunch American allies.

These blunders would be a little easier to take, if his supporters would stop telling us
how smart the man is.

Was Mayor Michael Bloomberg Ever A Teenage Boy?
Logically, he must have been, but it is hard to believe when you see him making decisions like
this one.

New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg defended his controversial proposal to prohibit
the sale large-sized sugary soda drinks in the city, arguing that it will combat obesity and
cut health-care costs.

During an appearance via video link Thursday at the D: All Things Digital conference,
Bloomberg said his plan to ban the sale of sodas larger than 16 ounces in restaurants and
movie theaters is part of an effort “to encourage people to live longer.”

For those who were never teenage boys, an explanation: Boys that age are hungry
all the time, and thirsty after they have been exercising, especially in hot weather.

So those big sugary drinks often look exactly right to a teenage boy, and almost certainly
don't do any harm, in moderation.

Incidentally, the sugar in those drinks is mostly
fructose,
the sugar found in all kinds of fruits. Which our ancestors ate for a very a long
time.

What They Said About Media Bias Isn't New — but it is
interesting to see it coming from
Politico.

On the front page of its Sunday edition, the New York Times gave a big spread to Ann
Romney spending lots of time and tons of money on an exotic genre of horse-riding.
The clear implication: The Romneys are silly rich, move in rarefied and exotic circles, and
are perhaps a tad shady.

Only days earlier, news surfaced that author David Maraniss had unearthed new details
about Barack Obama’s prolific, college-age dope-smoking for his new book, “Barack
Obama: The Story” — and the Times made it a brief on A15.

No wonder Republicans are livid with the early coverage of the 2012 general election
campaign.

(Ann Romney took up horse riding as a way of coping with her multiple
sclerosis.)

What I don't think that those running the New York Times, and similarly biased
"mainstream" news organizations, realize is that often they don't just look biased, they look
laughably biased.

That blatant bias is, among other things, funny.

(As you would expect, many on the left are
outraged
that Politico would says something this politically incorrect, and accurate.)

What Should George W. Bush Do On His Visit To
Washington, DC? After all, today's meeting is bound to be
awkward.

This is a little awkward.

President Barack Obama can't seem to stop bad-mouthing the record of former President
George W. Bush. But on Thursday, Obama is going to welcome his predecessor
and proudly preside as Bush's image and legacy are enshrined at the White House
forever.

Obama and first lady Michelle Obama will join Bush and his wife, Laura, as their official
portraits are unveiled. The incumbent is keeping up a presidential tradition typically
defined by cheer and graciousness, but not without some uneasiness.

I expect that the Bushes will behave — and I hope that the Obamas will.

But I do think that Bush ought to return to Washington soon, and hold a quiet fund raiser for
the private opportunity scholarships that
Dick Armey started.

Bush doesn't have to make the obvious comparison — that he is trying to help the
poor black kids whose public scholarships were killed by Barack Obama and Dick
Durbin — but others will.

Seattle police said they believe the same man was responsible for two deadly shootings
Wednesday in Seattle.

The man shot himself in the head on a West Seattle sidewalk as police closed in.

He is believed by police to have killed three people and wounded two others at Cafe Racer
Espresso in the University District earlier Wednesday. A half-hour later, a woman was
shot to death near Town Hall in the First Hill neighborhood by a man who fled the scene
in a black SUV.

Seattle isn't as used to such murder sprees as, for example, Chicago is, and so the city is in a
state of shock, relieved only by the word that the suspect, Ian Stawicki, had been
captured.

(As so often happens, early reports were wrong. The police originally said that
Sawicki has killed himself; now they are saying he is alive.)

- 6:14 PM, 30 May 2012

The suspected shooter and another victim died last night at the
hospital.
One more victim is in critical condition.

The Paul Krugman Recovery Plan: Fake an alien
invasion, so we can get spending up to where it should be. No, the Nobel prize-winning
economist, who calls his New York Times blog, "The Conscience of a Liberal",
really did say that.
More than once.

Sample:

This is hard to get people to do, much better, obviously, to build bridges and roads and
healthcare clinics and schools. But my proposed, I actually have a serious proposal
which is that we have to get a bunch of scientists to tell us that we're facing a threatened
alien invasion, and in order to be prepared for that alien invasion we have to do things like
build high-speed rail. And the, once we've recovered, we can say, “Look, there were
no aliens.”

But look, I mean, whatever it takes because right now we need somebody to spend, and
that somebody has to be the U.S. government.

On some level, I am sure that Krugman is not serious about this proposal, if only because of
the practical difficulties.

But that "whatever it takes" does reveal something about Krugman — and why so few
people on the center or right trust him. (I'm not sure how many people on the left
trust him, though many seem to find him useful.)

(For the record, weapons, perhaps including biological weapons, seem like a
more practical way to fight off an alien invasion.)

It's unanimous: A panel of renowned astrologers predicts President Obama will win
re-election in November.

That's the word from the last day of an astrology conference here that also forecast
earthquakes, explored the impact of lunar cycles on U.S. stocks and demonstrated how to
use planetary charts to find a job.

Because I would bet that astrologers have more customers among those who plan to vote
for Obama, than among those who plan to vote against him.

(Oddly, the reporter, Rick Jervis, seems to take the astrologers seriously. Respectable
newspapers almost always cover astrology with wink, so that readers will know that their
reporters haven't been fooled.)

The Three "Mistakes" In Obama's Literary Biography:
In this post,
I mentioned the literary biography in which Obama's agent claimed that Obama had been born in
Kenya.

I don't think it captures all that I have say on that now infamous brochure. (Perhaps because
I wrote it while I was coming down with a bug.)

Almost certainly, the information in that brochure comes from Obama himself. It includes
at least three "mistakes".

Barack Obama, the first African-American president of the Harvard Law Review, was born in
Kenya and raised in Indonesia and Hawaii. The son of an American anthropologist and
a Kenyan finance minister, he attended Columbia University and worked as a financial journalist
and editor for Business International Corporation.

Obama wasn't born in Kenya, his
father wasn't a finance minister,
and Obama wasn't a financial journalist for Business International.

(I am not sure whether the claims about Obama's anti-poverty positions, which follow that
segment, are correct. That's why I said "at least".)

Those "mistakes" almost certainly (probability greater than 99 per cent) came from Obama
himself. And I don't think that there is any mystery about his motive; he inflated his
resumé, as so many do, in order to make money, in this case by hyping sales of
his book.

The first mistake has drawn by far the most attention, but the other two mistakes deserve
just as much, because of what they tell us about Obama's truthfulness. Even at that
stage in his life, he had an exotic background that he could use, but he couldn't resist
embellishing it.

Why Does Obama Hate Camp David? According to Helene
Cooper, it's the
lack of golf.

Cooper said Obama “hates” going to Camp David, and she had never been able to understand
why President O[b]ama doesn't like going there until her most recent trip there with the
Commander in Chief.

Said Cooper: “Everybody's going, ‘why doesn't he spend more time up there?’ . . . No golf
. . . It’s all about the golf.”

Curious. President Eisenhower, another avid golfer, was quite fond of
Camp David,
which is named after his grandson, David.

More likely, Obama simply isn't as comfortable in the country as he is in the city.
Obama has admitted to disliking the suburbs where most Americans live, so we
shouldn't be surprised to find that staying in the countryside, where there are even fewer
people, makes him unhappy.

Is Obama Preparing To Write A Third Fictionalized
Autobiography? With some
new characters,
for added interest?

In two campaign speeches over the last two days, President Barack Obama has twice
mistakenly mentioned “my sons” when defending his administration’s regulation requiring
virtually all health-care plans in the United States to provide women, without any fees or
co-pay, with sterilizations and all Food and Drug Administration-approved contraceptives,
including those that can cause abortions.

I don't think Obama is referring to any real sons; I think that he slipped into saying sons,
because he could use them to support an argument he was making.

And that, perhaps, may be the way to understand Obama's fictionalized autobiographies.
They are intended to make a series of political arguments, with the facts modified, from
time to time, when Obama needed to, in order to support his conclusions.

It's something we should remember as we listen to him during this presidential
campaign.

And for the sake of the country, we can hope that he will have the time after November to write
his third autobiography — and I won't complain if it includes some instructive stories
about his nonexistent sons.

Courtship Secrets Of Sir Thomas More: You probably know
that Sir Thomas More
was Henry VIII's chancellor, and came to an unfortunate end when he could not help Henry
out with his marital problems. If you have seen
"A Man For All Seasons",
you probably admire him for his conscience. And , if you are Catholic, you probably know
that he was canonized in the 1930s.

But you may not know how practical he was about some matters.

A few days ago, I was re-reading David Bodanis's
The Secret House,
and in a section on the customs when everyone in a family slept together, ran across this little
historical tidbit.

All this sharing of bed and bedroom led to a certain easing of manners. There's the
account in Aubrey's Brief Lives where Sir Thomas More invites Sir William Roper into
the family bedroom to choose a wife. It was early in the morning, and More's two
teen-aged daughters were still asleep. More removed the sheets over the two girls,
which revealed 'them with their smocks up as high as their armpits'. They slowly
turned over, not bothering to pull down their smocks; Roper said 'I have seen both
sides', patted one on the bottom, and said she would be his wife.

Now doesn't that sound practical? There's no mention of any marital problems in
this brief biography of
Roper,
so it is likely the marriage was a success.

(The Bodanis book would be great fun for anyone who wants to see the science in daily life, along
with a little history.)

The Anti-Science New York Times: This is a
sensitive subject, so I am going to begin abstractly, before giving you the specifics.

A scientist makes a study. A decade later, he decides that the study was fatally flawed
and that he no longer believes in his original conclusion.

Can we, on that basis, decide that his original conclusion was a "pseudotheory"?

No, because as millions of high school chemistry students can tell you, doing an experiment
with the wrong procedures does not invalidate a theory.

A poor experiment (or study) shows us nothing, or almost nothing, about the theory it is
supposed to be testing. (Although it often shows us something about the
researcher.)

Now, let's apply that simple, common sense understanding of science to an editorial in
yesterday's Times.

Here, from Wikipedia,
is a description of the scientist and the controversial study.

Robert Leopold Spitzer[1] (born May 22, 1932) is a retired professor
of psychiatry and psychologist[2]. He spent most of his career at
Columbia University in New York City, New York, United States and was on the research faculty
of the Columbia University Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research. He was
a major architect of the modern classification of mental disorders. He retired after
49 years[3] in December 2010.[4] He is called
arguably the most influential psychiatrist of the 20th century.[5]
. . .
n 2001, Spitzer delivered a controversial paper, Can Some Gay Men and Lesbians Change
Their Sexual Orientation? at the 2001 annual APA meeting; in that paper, Spitzer argued
that it is possible that some highly motivated individuals could successfully change their
sexual orientation from homosexual to heterosexual. A 2001 Washington Post
article indicates that Spitzer held 45-minute telephonic interviews with 200 people who
claimed that their respective sexual orientations had changed from homosexual to
heterosexual. Spitzer said he "began his study as a skeptic," but the study revealed
that "66 percent of the men and 44 percent of the women had arrived at what [Spitzer]
called good heterosexual functioning," defined as "being in a sustained, loving heterosexual
relationship within the past year, getting enough satisfaction from the emotional relationship
with their partner to rate at least seven on a 10-point scale, having satisfying heterosexual
sex at least monthly and never or rarely thinking of somebody of the same sex during
heterosexual sex." Spitzer also found that "89 percent of men and 95 percent of
women said they were bothered only slightly, or not at all, by unwanted homosexual
feelings," but that "only 11 percent of the men and 37 percent of the women reported a
complete absence of homosexual indicators, including same-sex attraction." The
Post reported that "[s]ome 43 percent of the sample had been referred to Spitzer
by 'ex-gay ministries,'" while "an additional 23 percent were referred by the National
Association for Research and Therapy of Homosexuality." Spitzer has stated that
his research "shows some people can change from gay to straight, and we ought to
acknowledge that."[17] Considering how difficult it had been to find 100
participants, and that they were considered the best cases of conversion therapy, Spitzer
concluded that although change could occur, it was probably very
rare.[19][20]

Now Dr. Spitzer has recanted — and I use a word with religious connotations quite
deliberately — and so the Times celebrated by claiming that his recantation
showed the death of a "pseudotheory".

No, it doesn't, for the reasons I gave at the beginning of the post. Only a
better study could refute the theory.

Incidentally, considering how minimal his original claim was, that a very few gays and lesbians
can change orientation, it would be a hard theory to disprove. (And an easy theory to
substantiate, since all you need to do is find a few solid examples.)

Long ago, I accepted that scientists will often come to conclusions that displease me.
The editorial writers at the Times need to come to the same conclusion, and begin
judging scientific conclusions, not by their political correctness, but by the data.

(For the sake of relative brevity, I went along with the claim that the study is fatally flawed,
but I have my doubts about that, too, since Spitzer was simply looking for
examples. The study was flawed, certainly, but not perhaps fatally.

I'll have more to say about what real science says about this general subject eventually,
but for now, I'll just give you this
teaser.)

"A Cow Pie Of Distortion" Many have noticed, as Drudge
intended us to, how crude Obama's metaphor was. Professor Althouse reminds us,
at considerable length, how
stupid
it was. But you don't need to read her post, as entertaining as it is, to come to that
conclusion.

Now, I know Governor Romney came to Des Moines last week; warned about a "prairie fire of
debt." That’s what he said. (Laughter.) But he left out some facts.
His speech was more like a cow pie of distortion. (Laughter.) I don’t
know whose record he twisted the most -- mine or his. (Laughter.)

It is easy enough to understand Romney's metaphor, though it would have been better if he had
said debt growing like a prairie fire.

But what do cow pies have to do with distortion? That combination makes no sense at
all. It's just crude.

(What could the Obama speechwriter have used instead of "cow pie"? Fun house mirror
is traditional, and would work, and there are many other possibilities. And there are
ways you could use "cow pie", directly or indirectly, in a political speech and make sense.
But that wasn't one of them.)

Greece Has Tax-Free Shipping Companies: Ever wonder
why Greece has such successful shipping magnates? I have, once or twice.
Yesterday's New York Times gave me a partial explanation.

In an article on what Greece's rich are doing about the country's financial crisis (not much),
reporters Landon Thomas, Jr. and Eleni Varvitsioti explained that Greek shipping companies don't
have to pay taxes. Their tax-free status is not a temporary tax break; it is protected by
the Greek constitution. (Technically, I think they mean that the shipping companies don't
have to pay the direct taxes that other companies do. They probably pay indirect
taxes.)

Are the shipping companies likely to pay taxes in the future? Probably not, since almost
everyone assumes that the companies would just leave if they lost their tax-free status.
And Greece can't afford to lose its "top single foreign-exchange earner".

(The reporters, Landon Thomas, Jr. and Eleni Varvitsioti, make a more general claim about Greek
business that may help explain Greece's troubles:

Many economists say the [financial] oligarchs are big part of Greece's economic problem,
because they have capitalized on the insular, quasi-monopolistic approach to business that is one
reason their nation has long lagged the far more competitive economies of many other euro
zone nations

It's a plausible claim, but I would like to see a few of those economists' names.)